The day is finally here, the day that the GNOME team releases GNOME 3.0, the first major revision of the GNOME project since 2002. Little of GNOME 2.x is left in GNOME 3.0, and as such, you could call it GNOME's KDE4. We're living in fortunate times, what, with two wildly divergent open source desktops.

It's not nitpicking, it's a serious statement, you can't compare a DE to an entire OS, it just doesn't work that way, you can't even compare Gnome to Gnome on different FOSS operating systems, because Gnome on BSD is going to be a hell of a lot less "bloated" then on Debian, which would be more bloated than on Debian.